If it's about keeping data up to date then they should be able to return that money to either the consumers as a small discount (to encourage them to use the service) or the stores (as a kickback every time a shopper buys through the shopping results). I can't say I'm happy with this decision, even if it is only a portion of the results that they are talking about, it still feels like a money grab.

It's all in how you interpret the data. You can fudge the numbers enough so that a gun bought for defending the home is more likely to be used in a suicide (by a member of the household) than against an intruder. Statistics are a wonderful, terrible thing.

You don't need malice to explain the suspected discrepancy in this case. You've got a random sample of 1000 people, but it's not random. It's 1000 people who have landline phones. Who are home during the day. Who aren't on the no call list. Who don't have caller ID and/or are eager to answer opinion polls. That is a narrow group becoming narrower every day.

This is just one guy's graph from linked in, but it should at least give you an idea. Notice how people with similar jobs, interests, and abilities cluster together? You and your friends are effectively a sample size of one.

If there were a nothing with less something than the quantum vacuum it is statistically unlikely that there hasn't been a single instance of our nothing collapsing into the true nothing inside our Hubble volume. And if that happened we'd know all about it, because it would have spread here at the speed of light and erased off of existence.

I'm admittedly not religious, but I don't follow your argument (well, not yours but the one you're relating). If 'the fall of man' is defined as mankind disobeying god why does the fall have to happen precisely in the way genesis describes? Is there a man alive who has followed all of God's rules (as defined in by the Bible since our discussion is already centered on Christianity)? I doubt it. We all disobey so logically we have all fallen (I'm sure an apologist could argue that even being tempted to disobey is a sign of having falling), where would the contradiction exist in that scenario?

They will want to balance ease of opening with tamper resistance and tamper evidence. The press locks are very easy to open, but make shoplifting and 'spare parts' lifting trivial to do in the store, all the more so because it isn't obvious that the package has been opened. More likely, they will move toward the perforated back panels, so at least you'll be able to see if someone opened it before you bought it.

My point was two fold (hence the 50/50 split). 1) Crap patents 2) Crap patent system. Picking off crap patents one by one is inefficient but will get the job of eliminating the crap patents done eventually. The larger problem is the patent system. It's the system that let everyone sit in a Mexican standoff for 20 years, which is what has eventually led to the situation we see today.

And BTW, please at least look at someone's comment history before accusing them of shilling. It's one thing to accuse guy with 5 comments all being pro-whatever of being a shill. It's another to accuse someone with... well crap, I don't even know how many but several hundred comments on several dozen different topics over the past decade or so.

Yes, the difference is the forest fire eventually goes out. The smog from Atlanta is being produced 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Here's the thing. Every single one of the big phone manufacturers has a thousand patents that every other phone manufacturer has infringed on since the beginning of the industry. They all know this, but for literally decades everyone involved was smart enough to look at the situation and say "Oh hell no! I'm not starting that fight". The in strolled the new kid on the block, they bought some patents on the core technologies (enough to ensure they were inside the circle of mutually assured destruction along with the other manufacturers) but then they went and patented a few (frankly quite silly) UI patents. And so they thought to themselves, we might not be able to start the holy war on the core technologies, but we can certainly fire off just a few shots to protect our user interface. Which is a lot like the US during the cold war saying "surely the Soviets won't mind if we launch nuclear tipped cruise missiles at Kiev, after all, they're not ICBMs".

And the result has been about what you would expect. All out patent war in the cell phone industry, with constantly shifting alliances, tactics, and weapons. We've had import bans because a photo gallery app slid just past the available pictures to communicate to the user that they were at the end. We've had court cases fought over "Swipe to unlock". We've had multi-billion dollar companies bought, sold, and gutted for their patent portfolios. And, most importantly and the issue no one seems to pay attention to, we've created an environment where there is absolutely no chance, literally zero, of a new player entering the game.

So, you say to Google "build Android so that it doesn't infringe on patents". I say 50% of those patents are invalid, and it's just going to take the right court case to show that once and for all. Of the remaining 50%, everyone in the industry stomps all over them, to the point where even the biggest players can't be sure who owns what, who is defending what, and what their next project might infringe upon. It's broken. It's not really Apple's fault, even if they were the ones to set of Armageddon the system has been screwed up for too long to blame them. Any system that relies on cold war style MAD is going to break down eventually.